Articulatory Phonology: An Overview

Abstract

An overview of the basic ideas of articulatory phonology is presented, along with selected examples of phonological patterning for which the approach seems to provide a particularly insightful account. In articulatory phonology, the basic units of phonological contrast are gestures, which are also abstract characterizations of articulatory events, each with an intrinsic time or duration. Utterances are modeled as organized patterns (constellations) of gestures, in which gestural units may overlap in time. The phonological structures defined in this way provide a set of articulatorily based natural classes. Moreover, the patterns of overlapping organization can be used to specify important aspects of the phonological structure of particular languages, and to account, in a coherent and general way, for a variety of different types of phonological variation. Such variation includes allophonic variation and fluent speech alternations, as well as ‘coarticulation’ and speech errors. Finally, it is suggested that the gestural approach clarifies our understanding of phonological development, by positing that prelinguistic units of action are harnessed into (gestural) phonological structures through differentiation and coordination.

Influences on articulatory timing in consonant sequences

“…H3 , if supported , suggests an articulatory basis for this behavior (see also Byrd , 1992 ;Barry , 1992 ;and Browman & Goldstein , 1992a) .…”

ASL sign lowering as undershoot: A corpus study

“…The most popular current explanations for the kind of undershoot we see in Trudy, embodied in theories like Articulatory Phonology (Browman & Goldstein 1992), is that it is caused by two or more targets (or entire gestures) overlapping in time. The tongue body is almost literally being pulled in two directions at the end of the /u/ in Trudy: the target related to [u] wants the tongue body further back, the target for [i] -which is already in force before the end of the [u] -wants the tongue body further forward, resulting in a half-hearted compromise between the two and causing the tongue to undershooting the backness target.…”

Monitoring syllable boundaries during speech production

“…Syllables in the syllabary may possibly be represented in terms of gestural scores (Browman & Goldstein, 1992) specifying articulatory motor programs for syllable-sized chunks. Although there is very little on-line evidence for the use of syllables in speech production (Ferrand, Segui, & Grainger, 1996;Ferrand, Segui, & Humphreys, 1997;but see Brand, Rey, & Peereman, 2003;Schiller, 1998Schiller, , 2000Schiller, Costa, & Colome, 2002), the idea of having precompiled syllabic motor programs is very attractive because it decreases the computational load of the phonological/phonetic encoding component (Cholin, Schiller, & Levelt, 2004;Crompton, 1981;Levelt & Wheeldon, 1994; for lexico-statistical support see Schiller, Meyer, Baayen, & Levelt, 1996).…”